Bottled Messages May Bring Fortunes
ALIVE|November 2016

Some times, they can be instrumental in unleashing your bottled up fate.

T. Rajagopalan
Bottled Messages May Bring Fortunes

A bedraggled starving man wholly broken through the loss of his life’s savings, Jack Wurm by name, stood on seashore in San Fransisco in March 1949 to jump into the sea and take his life out. When he was about to take a plunge into the waters he found, to his astonishment, a bottle in the waves that crashed near him.

Impelled by curiosity, he picked up the bottle and browsed the contents of an epistle he found therein. “To avoid confusion, I leave my entire estate, to the lucky person who finds this bottle and to my attorney Barry Comen. Signed Daisy Alexander, June 10, 1937.”

The finder of the bottle came to know that Daisy Alexander aka Daisa Singer was none other than an eccentric heiress to some $1,2,000,000 of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. In 1938, Daisy who was then in the twilight of her life had expired of stroke and no final will could be found.

After Jack Wurm in California cracked the missing case of this will, Daisy’s close associates recollected that one of her eccentricities was to toss bottles into the river or sea and contemplate where would they sail and ultimately reach.

As an ocean-current expert explained that a bottle dropped into the Thames River in London could wash to the English Channel, then to the North Sea, through the Berring Straits into the North Pacific and end up in California or Mexico.

According to him, this would take approximately a dozen years. It took 11-and-a-half years actually. It took another seven years for the case to travel through various courts before Wurm was paid the fabulous sum.

Similarly a young boy, who worked in a farm, found a sealed bottle on the sands of a beach which contained a note that the finder would win an award of 10,000 dollars if the note was forwarded to an address in New York.

This story is from the November 2016 edition of ALIVE.

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This story is from the November 2016 edition of ALIVE.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.

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